Tuesday, January 01, 2019

Naive, Stupid, Evil, Trump (A Dorf on Law Classic)

Note to readers: Today is the final day of the holiday hiatus on Dorf on Law. To celebrate the beginning of 2019, I am re-posting a column that originally ran
on June 13, 2017, which might help to put some of the recent Trumpian insanity into perspective. Enjoy, and Happy New Year to all!

"Naive, Stupid, Evil, Trump"

by Neil H. Buchanan

Donald Trump is wrong almost all of the time about almost
everything. He lies constantly, and even though he is constantly being
caught in his transparent lies, he never admits error, pressing ever
forward on his destructive path.

Does he do this because he knows nothing about the world? (That is, is he naive?) Alternatively, maybe it is because he is incapable of logical thinking. (Is he stupid?) Or is it instead because he has horrible policy goals? (Is he evil?)

All three of those explanations fit, and then some. As Michael Dorf argued in a recent column,
normal human beings can be "evil, stupid, or ignorant," but "Trump is
not a normal human being. He is not even a normal but evil, stupid, or
ignorant human being. Trump is Trump."

In order to
understand how Trump is different, we first need to understand what it
means to be normal yet wrong in one of those three ways -- naive,
stupid, or evil. Because those three categories should be sufficient to
explain every bad decision, it is important to understand how Trump is a
category unto himself.

When Professor
Dorf and I were much younger men, we frequently discussed the many ways
in which the nation's then-new president, Ronald Reagan, was wrong. It
was a frustrating experience to watch a touchingly naive fool lead the
nation in harmful directions, but it certainly created a need to
understand exactly what was going wrong.

For me, the
issue that helped to clarify how to think about all of this was Reagan's
opposition to imposing economic sanctions on South Africa's apartheid
regime. Led by protests and boycotts on college campuses, politicians
on the left at that time were beginning to pressure our reactionary
president to force the Botha regime to change its shockingly racist
legal and social system.

Reagan resisted, arguing at
one point that South Africa was simply in the process of evolving into a
civil rights-friendly nation, just as the United States had evolved in
the fifties and sixties. This was jaw-droppingly wrong, so much so that
it took a great deal of effort to tease out Reagan's many errors.

One
possibility was that Reagan simply did not have the facts necessary to
see the situation clearly. As bad as the Jim Crow era had been in the
United States, it was obvious that South Africa was not "merely" going
through what the U.S. had experienced.

Moreover, Reagan
seemed not to know how bad things had been here, even though he had
lived through those decades. Saying, "They'll be fine, just like we
figured it out," could have been explained by complete ignorance about
one or both countries. The problem was that, even if Reagan himself
believed these fantasies, he surely had access to advisors who should
have known otherwise.

If ignorance about the facts was
not at work, it was possible instead that Reagan knew the facts but was
not smart enough to draw logical conclusions from them. Was there
something like 2 + 2 = 5 error at work in Reagan's head, a reasoning
error along the lines of "All men are mortal, Socrates was mortal, therefore all men are Socrates"?

Reagan
argued that sanctions would do no good, even though it was clear that
South Africa's government (notwithstanding its claims to the contrary)
was being forced to respond to world pressure. The civil rights leaders
in South Africa also rejected Reagan's argument, saying that outside
pressure was key to reaching the goal of ending apartheid.

In
any case, Reagan's policy errors did not seem to fit into the category
of mere logical folly. What seemed much more likely was that Reagan,
who had been supported by American racists and who had perfected Richard
Nixon's "southern strategy"
to scare white voters away from Democrats, was simply not particularly
concerned about the evils of white supremacy (and maybe actually
supported racist goals).

In short, Reagan's bad policy
views could be explained by one of three possibilities. He was naive,
or he was stupid, or he was evil. He might also have been some
combination of the three.

Being a young man, I thought that maybe I was onto something with
the naive/stupid/evil framing of policy debates. Admittedly, there was nothing
genuinely new in my taxonomy. People have often said things like, "He's either
a fool or a liar," when trying to explain their opponents' errors.

Moreover,
one has to decide how to treat things like willful ignorance. Is that a
fourth category? It turns out, however, that it is easy to explain
this as a version of evil, because a person who decides not to
gather facts must be doing so in order to avoid facing the consequences
of that knowledge. (This is currently seen, for example, in
Republicans' blocking government statisticians from gathering facts
about gun violence.)

The naive/stupid/evil taxonomy can
also be expressed with different synonyms --
ignorant/illogical/malevolent, uninformed/irrational/malicious, and so
on -- and the order can be changed. Hence, Professor Dorf's "evil,
stupid, or ignorant" rendering of the taxonomy.

In any
case, I have noticed over the years the many ways in which people who
are unaware of this taxonomy struggle to identify and understand what
they are seeing. Sometimes a shorthand is valuable simply for being a
shorthand. And the Trump era has left many people struggling to
understand what in many cases boils down to that simple triad.

For example, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post recently offered an excellent critique of Trump's ill considered Muslim ban, concluding with this:

"One might conclude that the administration is too incompetent or lazy to
make [its case in court]. We prefer a different theory: These orders
have no national security or other justification, but rather are blatant
appeals to prejudice that have no factual, rational basis. No lawyer in
the world can defend that in court."

In short, Rubin
first considers whether the administration is incompetent or lazy,
which are somewhat fuzzy concepts because incompetence can refer either
to stupidity or ignorance, and laziness is most likely (at least in
Trump's case) a version of willful ignorance, that is, evil.

By
saying that Trump has "no national security justification," Rubin means
that Trump's argument is not actually "stupid." That is, there is no
logical argument from Trump's people that says that A (the ban) causes B
(less terrorism). They simply assert their conclusion, as opposed to
offering a logically fallacious if-then argument.

Why
do they do that? Rubin reasonably concludes that Trump is evil because
he is appealing to prejudice. He is so focused on getting to an evil
outcome -- discriminating against people on the basis of religion and
national origin -- that he will deny reality and not even bother with
logical arguments.

An interesting variation on this method of framing the Trump problem was recently offered by the editorial board of The New York Times: "Stupidity, paranoia, malevolence — it’s hard to distinguish among
competing explanations for the behavior of people in this
administration."

Paranoia is a particular form of
ignorance, because it means that Trump's people are living in a
different reality from the rest of us. (Using "naive" here would sound
too much like an excuse, which is why I am calling it ignorance, with
all of its connotations.)

As I wrote above, however, I
agree with Professor Dorf that Trump is not simply the unique case of a
normal person who is somehow always dealing with an incomplete or
incorrect set of facts, or who makes logical errors, or who is always
acting in bad faith -- naive, stupid, or evil. He is his own category.

The
reason Trump is different is that there is always the sense (or hope)
that the normal people who have supported Trump are making one of more
of those three errors -- and, most importantly, that they might be open
to fixing those errors.

A person who thinks that there
was a "war on coal," for example, might be persuadable if she exited the
Fox New alternative-fact zone and saw that it is the simple economics
of cheap natural gas and other non-conspiratorial factors that explain
the decline of coal.

Also, a person who thinks that
Trump will bring back manufacturing jobs might, if prompted, notice that
Trump has no actual argument regarding how he will make that happen.

Even
people who are acting on what I am calling evil motivations are not
always beyond reach. People are sometimes able to confront their demons
and say, "Wow, I didn't realize that I was motivated by hatred." That
is one of the reasons that same-sex marriage has gained such wide
acceptance so quickly. Many people apparently thought to themselves,
"What was I so scared or angry about?" And the world became a
meaningfully better place.

But while that can happen
for some people -- even some of those who have supported Trump -- it is
impossible to imagine anything like that happening with Trump himself.

Many
of us do hold out some hope every day that even some of Trump's closest
advisors will say, "I can't do this anymore. I tried to deny to myself
what was happening, but this is simply too much." It is safe to say
that that will not happen with Steve Bannon or some others, but some people have said that even hard-core Trumpists like Kellyanne Conway might harbor doubts.

But
Trump? Not a chance. He is ignorant, both as a matter of never having
learned anything and because he likes it that way. He is stupid,
usually not even bothering to make an argument, and only capable of
making incoherent arguments when he tries. (We will, he says, just
start winning again, somehow.) His goals are racist, sexist, and in
other ways bigoted, and he is corrupt to boot.

What are we to think when we learn
that, say, Trump does not care about whether the Russian government is
undermining American democracy? He only cares about whether he will
look bad and lose power if the truth comes out.

"Trump is naive, stupid, and evil" simply does not cover it. Trump is Trump, and heaven help us all.

3 comments:

Last night I caught the last half hour or so of Mel Brooks' redemptive comedy "Life Stinks" involving two competing real estate typhoons [sic] over a proposed development that would evict many homeless. In recent years I have watched this movie imagining Donald Trump in Brooks' performance. But there is nothing redemptive of Trump, despite his support from the Revengelicals.